"He's just another fighter!"
"No he AIN'T just another fighter! This guy, is a WRECKING MACHINE! And he's hungry...hell, you ain't been hungry since you won that belt!"
Remember that exchange from Rocky III? I do, because I'm from the 80s! Remember those? It's hard not to, since a huge part of western cultural output for the last 20 years has been obsessed with them!
Nostalgia cycles are nothing new. It's easy enough to market to someone based on "remember being young?" The mid 70's through mid 80's looked back fondly on the 50's, with Happy Days and Back to the Future. In the 90s we got "That 70s Show" of course. They tried to jump the gun a little bit after that, you might remember "That 80s Show" which folded pretty fast. I have to assume this was because it was terrible, I still remember snippets of an ad campaign that managed to completely misunderstand what everyone liked about the Foremans. Eighties nostalgia took off proper a few years later, with the release of Vice City in 2002.
So that's normal so far, right? Well, if the regular pattern had held, that trend would have died off around 2010. It still plods along, however, increasingly tiresome long after putrefaction has set in. What's so special about the 80s? Why does it keep refusing to die, like so many of the movie monsters/slashers of the time?
Well I have a theory! The quote I chose to open with isn't a coincidence. In 1992, a book called "The End of History" postulated that the fall of the Soviet Union heralded the end of cultural struggle, that western liberalism (meaning the US and it's allies) was the clear victor, and from now on it was all going to be gravy. With no military power posing a threat to us, we had to look for new conflicts on which to base our cultural output. Aliens, conspiracy, environmental disaster, any threat we could come up with that could conceivably threaten us as we stood atop the world. This was also the heyday of generation X, who correctly perceived "This is all bullshit and it sucks", but incorrectly decided "No point in trying to fix anything".
As we wallowed in this smug complacency, we leaned into being the very thing that we needed someone else to be; a target that is very easy to hate, and must be overcome. Not only did our military hegemony subjugate most of the world, turning our new "friends" into insurgent populations, those of us here who recognize the atrocity of these situations were filled with a deep loathing for the things we do to maintain this order.
One effect of this malaise was a worsening of extant problems. Take for instance, school shootings. In the United States, these have always existed. There are news stories about them from the times where there would have been flintlocks involved. Insane violence is nothing new to people, no matter how shocking a particular instance might be. For example, one thing I think people don't fully consider with regard to Adolph Hitler and the Nazis is that the things they did weren't even unprecedented, genocide has been happening all throughout human history. What was truly horrifying about it was the scale and efficiency. So too was one of the most iconic malaise/nihilism events of the 90s, the Columbine High shooting. Not only was this setting the new pattern of extremes to come, it also fed the burgeoning and ever-ravenous media machine, desperate for something to sell.
After a few years of this, some kind of big thing happened in the early 2000s, honestly I forgot.
In the aftermath of this big whatever, we had a new enemy! THE TERRORISTS! Not as easy a concept to grasp as THE COMMUNISTS, and the way we choose to fight them seems to keep creating more of them, but we indulged our barely repressed bloodlust and felt like it was time to show the rest of the world what's up. So began the pointless and insane occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The biggest, most unstoppable military force in the world was going to finally FREE these people, and they will bow and weep in contrition, throwing flowers at our feet.
Any day now!
So, when faced with the realities of this extremely difficult task, we've retreated to the last point where we felt like we could reach for the stars. The 1980s! We had a concrete enemy, our big stupid action movies were awesome, synthesizers were kicking ass. Ronnie Reg was the last president the US unanimously loved (for whatever shit-eating monstrous reasons), and everything was looking up. As our adventures in the middle east continue, we can at least take solace in pink and blue, with lazer synth sounds.
Anyway, after 17 years of grinding and senseless loss of life, it sort of feels like maybe this invincible power is a little more, uh, vincible. Other players in the game are getting increasingly brazen.
And they're HUNGRY.
As an aside to this, I feel like there's a lot to be said about "internet culture". You can trace it back to USENET forums in the 80s, but it really started forming in the late 90s and experienced significant evolution up until, in my opinion, 2008, when the floodgates were opened. The over-monetization that came in the wake of the first iPhone being released slowed it down, but internet culture is evolving in a parallel way across the entire world. Maybe this is a stupid example, but check out the Russian meme scene sometime. You would think it would be pretty inscrutable, but as long as you have some way to translate cyrillic they're as relatable and understandable as one in english. There have been attempts at making this culture into something more mainstream and mass marketable, but every attempt at that thoroughly kills whatever it is they try to push. For instance, there was a wave of 90s nostalgia that came in the form of A E S T H E T I C, but that was entirely ironic and unmarketable.
Anyway after all that
I tried to make the colours less eye-searing this time. I also got extremely loose with certain design elements, because none of that was thought through and I was constantly having to go back and re-do parts I missed while improvising.
Still sort of fucking up on perspective, but I think it's a little better than last time.
Hope you like burnt orange!
This one didn't turn out as well as I wanted. The action isn't very well conveyed, the "whomp" doesn't really land well.
I did kind of like this one
Not extremely pleased with this one and the next, the drawings suffered because I rushed through the sketching phase. This was pretty late in it and I was eager to move on to the lines, which are also still kind of shitty. Trying some new brushes, they seem to be a little less jagged.
Bill's face brought me completely around to feeling good again.
The boys are tired, and so am I
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